Meghan Markle tells Oprah she didn't know how to curtsy before meeting Queen Elizabeth II
Before their first meeting, Markle said Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson helped her practice.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Meghan Markle revealed in a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey how naive she was about the ground rules of royal life, explaining that she didn’t know it was necessary to curtsy when meeting the Queen for the first time.
Markle told Winfrey "there wasn’t a lot of anxiety about meeting the Queen," but on the way over to meet her, Harry asked: "do you know how to curtsy?"
This image provided by Harpo Productions shows Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, left, in conversation with Oprah Winfrey. (Harpo Productions via AP)
"I thought genuinely that was what happens outside. I thought that was part of the fanfare," Markle said. "I didn’t think that was what happens inside. I thought, 'this is your grandmother.'"
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Markle said Harry reminded her that his grandmother was the Queen. Before their first meeting, Markle said Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson helped her practice.
"Apparently I did a very deep curtsy – I don’t remember it," Markle said. "It was lovely and easy and thank God I hadn’t known a lot about the family. I would have been so in my head about it."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Sunday night's airing of a two-hour special hosted by Winfrey will provide the first, and unprecedented, peek into the couple's departure from royal duties and the strains it has placed on them. Audiences in the United States are seeing it first; it will not air until Monday night in Britain.
"I will say I went into it naively because I didn't grow up knowing much about the royal family," Meghan said. "It wasn't something that was part of conversation at home. It wasn't something that we followed."
Meghan said she and Harry were aligned during their courtship because of their "cause-driven" work. But she did not fully comprehend the pressure of being linked the prestigious royal family.
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"It's easy to have an image of it that is so far from reality," she said. "And that's what was really tricky over those past few years, is when the perception and the reality are two very different things. And you're being judged on the perception, but you're living the reality of it. There's a complete misalignment and there's no way to explain that to people."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.